Enterprise workers today expect the same consumer-grade experiences in the workplace as they are used to in their private lives, a requirement that is driving demand for simplicity CIOs are struggling to address amid the proliferation of connected devices.  That growing gap between what the business needs and what IT organizations can deliver is the main theme at SAP’s Sapphire Now customer show in Orlando this week, where user experience has taken center stage following the company’s surprise decision to provide its Fiori suite for free with all software subscriptions.

Originally introduced at last year’s event, Fiori is a collection of more than 300 applications that can be split into three main categories: transactional utilities, role-specific analytical tools that provide access to information relevant to users’ work and dashboards aimed at making that data more consumable. Together, the apps constitute the “new user experience for SAP software”, according to the vendor.  Customers can customize individual components using the firm’s Screen Personas productivity tweaking software, which has also been made available for free.

Companies with more fine-grained requirements can build their own applications using SAP’s River Rapid Development Environment, which was released into beta in conjunction with the move to include in Fiori and  Screen Personas existing licenses.  The web-based platform features a specialized language for implementing business logic and data models within HANA, the in-memory analytic database that underpins the firm’s cloud strategy, which culminated in this week’s establishment of a dedicated unit tasked with developing managed services tailored to meet the requirements of specific industries.

The financial services sector is set to be of particular focus for the division, which is not coincidentally led by Simon Paris, SAP’s former head of global banking. Sure enough, the vendor followed up the launch with the introduction of a new set of financial service built atop the cloud-based version of HANA.

The suite, aptly named SAP Simple Finance, provides a unified environment that advanced packs planning and analytical capabilities in addition to the usual transaction management functionality. The firm touts that this centralized approach makes it easier to maintain information consistency while removing many of the unnecessary moving parts in the data processing lifecycle, which has traditionally been spread across multiple silos.

Simple Finance pulls everything together in one place. It allows users to combine financial information about their organizations with data from the surrounding ecosystem of customers, suppliers, banks and government agencies into a holistic repository that can then be analyzed in various ways. SAP says that the suite supports both batch and real-time processing as well as predictive analytics, namely the ability to estimate the probable success of specific decision and business models.  Analysts can communicate the  results to their colleagues using a self-service reporting feature that makes it possible to narrow in on specific data points like month-end activities.

Arriving hot on the heels of Simple Finance is another department-specific service called Consumer Insight 365 that uses HANA to sift through mobile traffic for patterns that may be useful for ad targeting and campaign optimization. Users can hook up other information sources to their environments leveraging a new complementary integration tool that SAP says supports both on- and off-premise applications, including competing solutions.

Once all the relevant data is safely inside HANA, it can be analyzed using the latest version of the company’s Data Services and SAP Information Steward, which was also unveiled this morning. The release adds support for Hadoop 2.0, a set of interactive dashboards for monitoring jobs and improved capabilities for defining validation rules and views. It’s joined by a cloud edition of the company’s Mobile Secure offering that has been re-architectured to utilize the in-memory database for spotting malicious network activity.

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